Paul McCartney (68 page)

His stepsister Ruth, who’d taken up music with his encouragement, achieved some success as a singer-songwriter, signing with Jupiter/BMG records and releasing an album entitled I Will Always Remember You (in memory of Jim) which sold well outside the UK and reached number one in Russia. Angie never remarried, and mother and daughter stayed together, living in Germany, Australia and latterly on America’s West Coast, launching a multimedia company with Ruth’s third husband, producer Martin Nethercutt.

Now an octogenarian, Paul’s stepmother remains a vivacious, energetic figure with her own line of ‘Mrs McCartney’ organic teas and a daily blog. They haven’t communicated since the mid-1970s but, watching him from afar, Angie’s constant thought is that ‘Jimmy Mac’, her pet name for his dad, would be proud of him.

Wings arrived in America in 1976 exactly a decade after the Beatles’ last tour there, and with no guarantee of even moderate success. Despite Paul’s latter Billboard chart-toppers, he knew he was taking a huge chance in performing without John, George and Ringo in the land where Beatlemania lingered on most stubbornly. American cinemas were currently showing a film comprising footage of the Beatles in the early and mid-Sixties, whose lines around the block rivalled those for A Hard Day’s Night or Help! Whenever Paul’s mop-topped face appeared on-screen, the squeals were as demented as ever.

Stateside Beatles-reunion rumours were always at their biggest and brassiest. In February, a Los Angeles promoter named Bill Sargent had offered a guaranteed $50 million for a single performance back together, anywhere in the world they cared to name, to be shown on closed-circuit television. Sargent was said to be ‘in talks’ with George’s lawyer while John–supposedly the immovable obstacle to all such ideas–privately told Apple’s managing director Neil Aspinall, ‘I’d stand on my head in the corner for that kind of money.’

Since then, Mike Matthews, head of the Electro-Harmonix guitar-accessory company, had placed a rival bid of $3 million down with a percentage of the TV syndication that could have taken the Beatles’ share to around $30 million. Again, no outright refusal came from three of them; only Paul’s lawyers, Eastman & Eastman, responded that neither Matthews’ nor Sargent’s offer was even being considered.

Midway through Wings Over America Paul would turn 34, an age once thought inconceivable for a rock star. On the tour’s Australian leg in late 1975, a tactless newsman had asked if he wasn’t getting a bit old for all this. ‘Ancient,’ he answered through gritted teeth. ‘Just come along and see the show and then tell me if you still think I’m past it.’

With all these pressures weighing, he prepared Wings for America with four months’ intensive rehearsal in between the tour’s UK, European and Australian legs. He also boosted their line-up with a four-man horn section comprising his old Liverpool and Hamburg friend Howie Casey and three top session-players from Sea-Saint Studios in New Orleans. There was a dress rehearsal at Elstree film studios in front of an invited audience including Ringo and Harry Nilsson–kept a total secret in case Ringo’s presence set off another reunion story.

Among Paul and Linda’s 20-strong entourage were their housekeeper, Rose Martin, to look after Mary and Stella, and a tutor for 13-year-old Heather. There would also be the first ‘artist-in-residence’ ever taken on a rock tour, a young painter named Humphrey Ocean to whom it would hardly be a novelty. Ocean also played bass in Kilburn and the High Roads, a new London band led by a then unknown Ian Dury, whom Paul particularly rated.

To soften up the US market, there was a new studio album, Wings at the Speed of Sound–for which Humphrey Ocean had designed the inner sleeve–and a single, ‘Silly Love Songs’, Paul’s riposte to critics who complained his music was too lightweight: ‘Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs… and what’s wrong with that I’d like to know?’ Nothing apparently: it spent five weeks at the top of the Billboard chart and would be his biggest-ever American hit.

In the end, all this meticulous pre-planning was derailed by Jimmy McCulloch, ever the loose cannon of Wings’ line-up. During February’s European leg, he had a boozy scuffle with another angelic-looking popster, David Cassidy, in a Paris hotel bar, sustaining a broken finger that left him unable to play his guitar. Departure for the US therefore had to be put back a month. The media were told Jimmy had slipped on a wet marble floor while getting out of his hotel bath.

America at the time was gearing up for a presidential election that would see Republican incumbent Gerald Ford (a stopgap after Richard Nixon had left office, disgraced by the Watergate scandal), pitted against a dizzy-looking peanut farmer from Georgia named Jimmy Carter. ‘But none of it impinged on us,’ Humphrey Ocean remembers. ‘Wherever we went in the country, the only big story in the papers or on TV was Paul.’

To spare the children the boredom of travelling huge distances between shows, the McCartneys had rented four comfortable family homes, in Dallas, New York, Chicago and LA, basing the girls at each one in turn, flying out to gigs in a customised jet hired from Braniff Airlines, then returning the same night. The equipment and crew went by road in a convoy of giant white trucks, equipped with state-of-the-art citizen-band radios, the leading truck with ‘WINGS’ in vertical red letters along its roof, the second with ‘OVER’ and the third, ‘AMERICA’.

The two youngest children were always around; angelic blonde Stella carried in her father’s arms during meet-and-greets with fans; dark Mary, beaming minus one milk tooth from the rear window of a limo; both of them noisily rushing around, pretending to be aeroplanes, during pre-performance soundchecks. In those less fearful days, the only security watching over them was a fair-haired young giant in platform boots and flares known as Billy and said by Paul to have ‘a heart of gold’.

He and Linda still attracted criticism for taking such little ones on the road, depriving them of childhood’s normal, healthy routines and exposing them to the myriad horrid habits associated with rock stars. However, Mary McCartney recalls how she and her sister were always put to bed at the proper time, despite their pleas to stay up. ‘Yes, there were parties,’ Paul himself admits, ‘but they were more family parties.’

In any case, Wings in their downtime were the healthiest, most outdoorsy rock band around, less likely to be found skulking in shuttered motel rooms than out on horseback with their leader. Denny Laine had learned to ride in Scotland and Jimmy McCulloch, too, proved adept at it. Galloping behind Paul and Linda, the uptight boy maestro visibly relaxed, his puckered, never-to-age face becoming as clear and uncomplicated as an extra child’s.

The American shows were their most spectacular yet, with lasers, billowing smoke, exploding ‘flash-pots’, slow-and fast-motion effects and constantly changing back-projections including a film of the Band on the Run cover photo-shoot, with Clement Freud and Christopher Lee, and a homage to American Marvel comic books by David Hockney.

In a performance lasting almost two hours (as against the 30 minutes tops the Beatles used to do) Paul worked his way through Wings at the Speed of Sound, Venus and Mars and Band on the Run, as well as pre-Wings highlights like ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’. There was also ‘Let ’Em In’, a soon-to-be-released second single from Wings at the Speed of Sound that carried another poignant memory of his father. At McCartney family gatherings in Liverpool, a constantly chiming doorbell used to announce relays of new partygoers while Jim tirelessly thumped away on the piano. On the record, an identical door-chime introduced fanciful guests, like ‘Martin Luther’ and ‘Phil and Don’ (Everly), along with true-life relatives Brother Michael, Uncle Albert and Auntie Gin.

Out of all Wings’ many line-ups, Paul was always to consider this the best ever. His newest appointment, Joe English, was not only a fine drummer and a good harmony singer but a force for unity, hitting it off equally well with Denny Laine and the volatile Jimmy McCulloch. Best of all, the woman he loved and depended on for everything else was no longer regarded as the band’s weakest link.

For years, Linda had struggled with the basic keyboard-chords he showed her, exasperating the highly skilled musicians in the band, feeding resentments and triggering rows, sometimes even exhausting Paul’s patience. Once he’d blurted out that he could have had Billy Preston instead of her, but then instantly regretted it and apologised. Always she had been the first to admit: ‘I’m not here because I’m the greatest keyboard-player. I’m here because we love each other.’ Now she was a competent, if not brilliant, musician who no longer had to be hidden away at one side of the stage but could be placed on a high plinth behind him.

And with that, her deep discomfort–stage-embarrassment rather than stage-fright–had vanished. The great black arena spaces full of judgemental eyes that used to appal her now seemed positively welcoming. ‘I find big stadiums really intimate,’ she told one interviewer. ‘I don’t ever want to go back to the little ones.’

Throughout the show came reminders that Wings shouldn’t be regarded as just a one-man band. Laine got to sing his ‘Go Now’, the Moody Blues’ mega-hit from 1964, with Paul and Linda on backing vocals; Jimmy McCulloch sang his co-composition ‘Medicine Jar’; and drummer Joe English took the lead vocal on ‘Must Do Something About It’.

The interlude where Paul, Linda, Denny and Jimmy sat in a row playing ‘Bluebird’ seemed as intimate, harmonious and egalitarian as rock musicians could ever be. However, as the tour’s artist-in-residence, Humphrey Ocean, had soon learned, democracy had its limits. ‘Paul and Linda were always very friendly and open, but there was a moment when one had to step back,’ he remembers. ‘And after every show, they got in their limo and went off to their house, whichever one it was, and the band went to hotels.’

For the first time, Wings’ set list included a selection of Paul’s Beatles’ songs: ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face’, ‘Lady Madonna’, ‘Blackbird’, ‘Yesterday’ and ‘The Long and Winding Road’. To begin with, he introduced each one almost apologetically, as ‘an old one you may remember’. Always a kind of muted tidal wave through the vast indoor darkness confirmed that indeed they did.

Unfortunately, the effect was to re-ignite questions from the media at every stop about a possible Beatles reunion for one or other of the multimillion-dollar paydays on offer. For a good two-thirds of the tour, the B-word ran through Paul’s every interview:

Q. Have you seen the Beatles lately?

A. We run into each other and stuff. We’re just good friends.

Q. Is Wings really a logical development from the Beatles?

A. Well, I’ve always written songs, but with the Beatles we only ever rehearsed for three days at the most. With this band, we rehearse a lot.

Q. Will Wings ever become as big as the Beatles?

A. I think it could be, funnily enough.

Q. How different is Wings from the Beatles?

A. They scream at our concerts, but they don’t scream as much. People used to come and scream and didn’t hear any of the music. Now they can.

Q. Do you want to bring back the Beatles?

Heedless of the answer, American TV news reporters, with their walrus moustaches and hideously striped shirts, went away and filed the stories their editors wanted: ‘Tonight, maybe–just maybe–the four Beatles could be back onstage together. And if it happens, you’ll know about it first on Eyewitness News.’ In the end, Paul became so exasperated, he made up a little poem like those the world heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali (whom he’d met on the Beatles’ first American trip in 1964) was wont to deliver to taunt his opponent and predict his own victory:

The Beatles split in Sixty-nine and since then they’ve been doin’ fine. And if that question doesn’t cease, ain’t no one gonna get no peace. And if you ask it just once more, I think I’m gonna break your jaw.

But by the time Wings Over America reached Seattle on 10 June, the tide had turned. An audience of 67,000 at the Kingdome broke the national attendance record at an indoor event. Paul was on the cover of Time (‘McCartney Comes Back’) and a slew of other magazines including People and Creem. ‘McCartney has returned to the US victorious,’ began a typical report. ‘Alone of the ex-Beatles, he has formed a new band and it’s that band that provides the popular music event of the year… making the same impact the Beatles made a decade ago, but with a new sound for a new generation.’

The tour would later be turned into a chart-topping triple live album and a cinema documentary, Rockshow, which was among the first productions distributed by Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax company. Weinstein found a lucrative market on American college campuses, so taking Wings to audiences too young to mourn the Beatles–and giving Paul a US ‘university tour’ to bookend his modest British one of 1971.

After Seattle, the scenes of welcome were as wild as any in the Beatles years–but now for only one, not four. Tour artist Humphrey Ocean was on his way to filling eight sketchbooks, largely with portraits of individual audience-members reacting to Paul. ‘The girls all had the same look on their faces,’ Ocean recalls. ‘They’d saved themselves for him, even though they all knew perfectly well he was already married.’

In his euphoria, Paul could even overlook another of Jimmy McCulloch’s inexplicable mood swings after a show when the audience was roaring for an encore but McCulloch, for some reason, didn’t want to do one. Instead of acting the big star boss, Paul simply grabbed him and bundled him back onstage where, with typical contrariness, he played his best all evening.

On 18 June, that much-dreaded thirty-fourth birthday, the tour personnel gave their star a surprise party featuring a Mexican mariachi band that Jim McCartney would have loved. There was also a piñata, a dangling papier mâché animal filled with sweets and toys that a blindfolded Paul had to break apart with a long stick. After a couple of wild flails, he caught it squarely and multicoloured goodies rained down. Not unlike Wings Over America in fact.

Three nights later at Inglewood Forum, Ringo suddenly jumped onstage, presented him with a bouquet and they hugged–both gestures utterly alien to young men in Liverpool when they were growing up. After the show, Ringo came backstage, pretending to be frog-marched with one arm pinned behind his back. But there was no mistaking the rekindled affection between them, nor Paul’s pleasure when Ringo conceded that the show ‘wasn’t so bad… eight out of ten’.